


Homesick

by HollowIsTheWorld



Category: One Piece
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Marineford Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 01:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10583832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HollowIsTheWorld/pseuds/HollowIsTheWorld
Summary: Ace has been homesick for as long as he can remember.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [tumblr](http://will-of-his-own.tumblr.com/post/159395916745/homesick).

Ace has been homesick for as long as he can remember. 

It's a terrible feeling, being homesick, if you don't know where home is and only know where it is not. It's not here; not in the woods in a house with too many people and a blanket on the floor for a bed. It isn't in the scrap heap, nor is it in the city where people talk about how the king of the pirates got what he deserved. It is not, despite what Grandpa tries to tell him, in a navy barrack somewhere, surrounded by people who would execute him if they could read his blood like a book and see his family tree printed in it.

He begins to think he was born to be homesick; that it is a part of him as much as his blood and his freckles and his anger. 

He doesn't know what he's angry at, but at least he always finds plenty of things to hit in response. 

He’s usually angry at Grandpa, hates him sometimes, most times, and he wonders if he's capable of love, wonders if Roger was, if Roger’s blood hollowed out his heart before it had its first chance to beat. 

He learns he can love when Sabo is gone, when he sees Luffy crying and he clenches his fists, thinking he will kill anything that dares to touch him, that threatens to take the one brother that remains. It's a terrible way to learn that he is capable of this feeling. Leave it to him to learn about the world’s favorite feeling by attaching barbs to it and letting it rip through his chest. 

He doesn't love anyone else, he doesn’t think. There is some affection for Dadan, he will admit, privately, and there is a complicated tangle somewhere in his chest for Grandpa, but they are not Sabo and they are not Luffy and if it  _ is _ love it isn’t the same sort.

He likes Makino. He doesn’t love her, but he likes her, and it’s simple, at least. He likes that she brings him presents and remembers his birthday when even Grandpa forgets sometimes, or else remembers but doesn't come. 

A poisonous part of him - most of him is poison - wonders if she would still come if Luffy wasn't there. He will never find out and he will always wonder and he will never want to know. 

He doesn't resent Luffy for it though. Luffy, somehow, has hollowed out a sanctuary in the poison and is never touched by the worst of it. The edges brush against him sometimes, but he never seems to notice. Ace is grateful for that. He can't poison Luffy the way he has everything else. He won’t allow himself to. 

So he doesn't resent Luffy for the way everyone loves him and is dragged to him as though he’s a magnet, as though he is the center of the world’s gravity. It is not Luffy’s fault, and Ace can't think of anyone who deserves it more, and when he sets off in his little ship to become a pirate he thinks of that and knows that Luffy, when  _ he _ leaves home in three years, will find a crew to look after him, because Luffy is so hard not to love. It makes it easier to leave, to not worry. He feels bad, debates about it a little, but as much as he loves Luffy, that homesickness is still tugging in his chest and he has to find a way to make it stop before it kills him.

He sets off onto the sea, still unbearably homesick day after day and he doesn't know where he's going, so he sets his sights on Raftel and a crown because sibling rivalry and everyone needs a goal anyway. Then, at least, everyone who hates him will have a reason to. 

If Roger was alive, he wonders, would he have loved him? Or would Ace be a disappointment to him too?

_ You don't take after old Roger much. _

It is not a compliment or an insult. Just a statement of fact. Garp always did use to say he took more after his mother, though Ace is pretty sure he just meant his looks. He thinks Pops might mean more.  _ Look on your face when you came in here, I thought you had something important to say.  _ No one had ever simply not cared. Sabo had stopped caring. Luffy has clamped down on his hero worship, and if he still cared he had stopped showing it to Ace. 

But they had cared once. Everyone cared, at least for a minute. 

Not Pops. And something unwinds from around Ace’s chest, lifts itself off his shoulders, and he can pull more air into his lungs than he ever could before. He hadn’t known breathing could be this easy. The Spade pirates notice the difference. Most of the crew does. Most attribute it to being a commander, say that leadership suits him. The other commanders look at him knowingly and Ace wonders what parts of their pasts Pops forgave and forgot. 

He doesn't ask. Their pasts, their blood, it all matters so little out here. They don’t ask either, and it doesn’t feel like they’re hiding secrets from each other; it’s like not asking why the sky is blue or why the ocean is wet. The answers don’t matter, so neither do the questions.

Ace never knew he could love this many people this much. It doesn’t feel like he should be able to keep this much in his chest, and it somehow weighs a thousand pounds and nothing at all at the same time. 

Then Thatch is dead in a pool of his own blood and everyone tells him to  _ calm down _ and he doesn't understand because how could he be calm, how could  _ they _ be calm? Teach has killed Thatch, has knocked out one of the walls of their home, and maybe Ace can't make him rebuild it, but he  _ can _ make him pay _.  _ His grandfather is a marine. He taught Ace that people have to pay for their crimes. Their definitions of crime are different, they disagree on what sorts of punishments to dole out, but they see eye to eye on the necessity.

And so now Ace is here, at the end, and he is pulling air into his lungs and pushing blood back out, and he is in Luffy’s arms as though  _ he _ is the big brother. 

Its wrong. Luffy is the youngest, should have stayed that way, it's Ace’s job - and his alone - to be the oldest. He promised that, to the ghost of a boy who was shot down while fleeing for freedom. 

He's breaking two promises for the price of one. He wonders if Sabo is watching, if he's angry, if he thinks it would have been better for Ace to die and him to live, because _ he  _ wouldn't have failed Luffy like this. 

He wonders if his mother can see him, if she thinks it was worth it to die or if she wishes she had given him to the marines. 

He thinks of the children who died while they hunted for him, and wonders if enough of their spirits linger to curse him for living while their potential was snuffed out. 

And now he's dying here, in the middle of a sea of corpses that died either to save him or to kill him. 

Maybe it's for the best. He doesn't know if he could ever give another order while knowing their captain, their father, died to rescue him. He doesn't know if he could ever sleep again without seeing Oars Jr. collapse, without hearing his comrades scream because dying  _ hurts _ , he knows that now, he knows what they felt as they fell. 

What Sabo felt as he went to the water, all those years ago.

He had wanted to go home, but without Pops, without so many crewmates, with all that guilt, he doesn’t know if it would still have been home, and he thinks the only thing that might be worse than not having a home at all would be to walk into his home and find it had stopped welcoming him. 

He would not have forgiven himself, so maybe it's better to die, though he hates himself for thinking it while Luffy begs him to live, begs for a doctor, reminds Ace that he  _ promised _ . 

He shouldn't have promised. What, had he thought himself immortal, capable of declining when Death came to call? 

The answer, he knows, is yes. He had been strong, stronger than anything the forest could throw at him, stronger than the pirates in the bay or the criminals in the garbage or the nobles in the town. He had defeated everything he met, again and again, only losing to Sabo, and then only sometimes. 

He had thought himself invincible. Luffy had believed it. Ace had allowed him to believe it. 

And now he is dying and Luffy is learning Ace isn’t invincible, nothing is, and he is going to be alone, alone,  _ being lonely is more painful than being hurt _ , and where is Luffy’s crew, why aren’t they with him, how could they have left their captain at a time like this, when he was going to need them more than he ever had before, more than he’s ever needed anyone. 

He hopes they’re just waiting somewhere. He hopes Luffy has not lost them, not as he is about to lose his brother too. 

He’s leaving Luffy alone. He doesn’t want to, but the only way around it is if he learns how to breathe blood in place of oxygen. 

He can hear Vista and Marco shouting somewhere. He thinks he heard Pops roar, but maybe it was an echo, a memory. Everything is blurry and far away, like a fever dream, except for Luffy, who is warm underneath him and Ace can tell he’s bleeding all across Luffy’s clothes. 

Luffy’s wearing yellow. He used to wear yellow a lot, but he favors red these days. It’s a shame he’s switched back, Ace thinks distantly. The red wouldn’t show the blood so much. 

He wants to tell Luffy it’s not so bad as he thinks. Wants to tell him about how much pain he’s been in his entire life, and how Luffy and Sabo and the Whitebeard pirates took it away, but words don’t cover it, don’t explain it, and he can’t reach into Luffy’s chest and make him feel it, make him feel the way it had seeped into Ace’s bones and made them heavy, made them ache until he wanted to break them to make it stop. 

There are not enough words in the world to explain that. He settles for  _ thank you _ , hoping Luffy will understand, knowing he won’t.  _ Ace _ doesn’t understand, he just knows that it’s true, knows that it’s right. 

As long as Luffy doesn’t think he’s lying. That’s the important thing. Luffy will find a way to forgive himself, to recover from this - he bounces back, he always bounces back - as long as he doesn’t think Ace’s last words are a lie. 

_ Thank you _ .  _ Thank you for loving me, for keeping me alive because I didn’t know how to do it for myself. Tell my friends, the other part of my family, thank you for the home. Thank you for giving me a place where I could breathe, could sleep, could think about something other than the question of if I deserved to do either of those things.  _

That was what home was, the one he had spent nearly two decades searching for, and it’s terrible that he can’t keep it, but he had  _ found _ it, and that would have to be enough. Home was Pops, was Marco, was Vista, Jozu, Izo, the Moby Dick, the Jolly Roger flag that snapped in the wind above their heads. 

_ Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  _

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, when he was a child, not yet angry and bitter, all sharp edges and teeth, he had asked someone in Goa kingdom where people went when they died. She had said Heaven, and then he had asked her what Heaven was.

_ Home _ , she had said.  _ It’s going home and staying there, forever and ever and ever.  _

So at least he knows where he’s going this time. 


End file.
